Milan Cerny, SAP – “Team Liquid Is Our Approach to Get a Foot in the Door in the Player Performance Side of Esports”

Esports sponsorships with food, beverage, and other consumer brands are usually the ones snapping up headlines. As important as these are to flavor the industry’s image, partnerships that strengthen the foundation of competitive video gaming i.e. the players, are vital in the long term. Case in point: SAP, a multi-national enterprise application software company, which has turned its attention to the esports space, and to Team Liquid in particular.

“Sports, in general, has been a topic for SAP since the last 20 years,” says Milan Cerny, technology and innovation lead for SAP global sponsorships. “There was a shift in strategy roughly around the year 2011, where we said we want to go away from that standard approach, where a sponsorship usually means a logo placement, and some kind of partnership fee, and maybe a hospitality exercise. We wanted to move more towards content and technology-driven marketing.”

Cerny explains that the company’s sports partnerships can be mapped into three perspectives, all of which will be applied to esports. These are, 1) helping to make the sport more transparent and understandable to certain audiences, 2) helping athletes, teams, and coaches to learn from their mistakes, and refine strategies, and 3) working with governing bodies, leagues, and organizers.

…It’s really about gaining the trust and working with the players and coaches…get their ideas, get them to open up and share whatever keeps them awake at night.”

“Team Liquid is our approach to get a foot in the door in the team and player performance side of things,” he says. “Even when you talk about someone like Team Liquid, they have different teams on its roster, and each one needs to be looked at individually. Then it’s really about gaining the trust and working with the players and coaches in a close and collaborative way. Get their ideas, get them to open up and share whatever keeps them awake at night.”

The partnership itself will see SAP developing an original, in-house software for Team Liquid, centered around SAP HANA—the company’s core, in-memory data platform, capable of processing and analyzing big data in near real time, as SAP claims. In its announcement, the company also said its cloud platform, and solutions in IoT, predictive and machine learning are being considered for esports application. This opens considerable opportunities for Team Liquid, who recently opened an 8,000 square foot training facility.

“The most obvious goal for us is helping Team Liquid to be the most successful team in the world,” says Cerny. “It’s equally important for us that the collaboration model works well, that we do have this relationship where we help each other. So, we actually look into the pain points and the requirements that they might have in every aspect. That could be games and in-game data, as well as challenges that management is facing on a daily basis.”

“We’ve done things like joint workshops with Dota 2 players, for instance, who we invited into a room here in Walldorf, and we had a brainstorming session…”

Cerny says the company’s entry into esports was more a process than a singular event. After seeing the growth of competitive video gaming as a business, SAP began digging in, and working with experts. This process took roundabout a year. During that time, the multi-national company has even integrated esports internally, hosting an employee tournament across four regions.

“We also had an employee event at our headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, where we had many participants come in, with their kids as well,” he says. “The reactions were quite overwhelming. During this process, we found out that the enthusiasm for esports in general within SAP is quite big. We’re getting lots of good feedback, many people are reaching out to us who want to contribute.”

“We’ve done things like joint workshops with Dota 2 players, for instance, who we invited into a room here in Walldorf, and we had a brainstorming session, see how we could, as SAP, enter the space, and help the community grow and benefit. It’s a great movement, a great enthusiasm that we see internally, and that’s great to see that the community and employees are standing behind this initiative.”

Though confident in its inaugural partner, this will not be the last interaction SAP has with esports. With a portfolio that includes dozens of sports stakeholders, Cerny says that the company is in constant discussion about future possibilities for partnerships in, say, events. He adds that software development, the backbone of the Team Liquid collaboration, always takes time, but also that company has more in its stores that it can and will offer to the space.

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